I have practiced Yoga for ten years. My teacher was the author and Hatha Yoga master Swami Vishnudevananda also known as the flying Swami.
I took the TTC and became a memver of the staff at the yoga camp and ashram in Val-Morin, Québec.
I taught Hatha Yoga at the camp and ashram, in Montreal at the center there, and in New York.
I went on a conference and Hatha Yoga demonstration tour of five East European countries with Swami Vishnudevananda, the celebrated Canadian psychic Marylin Rossner as well as a female advanced Hatha Yoga teacher whose name I can’t remember now.
This was during the existence of the Soviet Empire.
But, the apparitions in Medjugorie had already started. During our stay in Tito’s Yugoslavia, we visited the village, met some priests, and spoke with one of the youths who had seen the Virgin Mary. I personally saw the lifesize statue of Mary in this visionary’s room.
Now I’m thinking about enlightenment and the IQ.
I grew up in a shuttered milieu, impervious to the outer world. It was called Polonia, the Polish minority’s community. Moreover it was postwar Polonia, made up of the Polish aristocracy.
I was not aware of the existence of the working class untill I visited communist Poland in 1976.
I thought God had created everything.
Of course, the workers were enslaved by the Communist elite.
What I’m trying to say is, as a result of my upbringing and isolation, I have a below average IQ. But I took the test only once in my life at the age of 14 or 15.
Being a yogi for so long, I’ve reached the conclusion that Yoga does not make you more intelligent, in my case, and that intelligence is required to reach enlightenment.
The higher the IQ, the higher you can raise the kundalini.
But, spontaneous kundalini arising doesn’t make one smarter.
In short, enlightenment isn’t the same as a high IQ score. Or is it?
You can’t reach it by being a nitwit, as my father would say to me.
Do you REALLY need to seek a questionable enlightenment if you already have a high IQ score?
I said questionable, because intellectually speaking there’s nothing in it from a rational point of view. Even my darkened mind which feels like a light under a bushel, as Christ once said, can tell me that there’s nothing in oneness, mindfulness, the higher self.
Unless that’s a high IQ which I lack.
So what on earth is enlightenment and how can it defy logic?
How can it become a conundrum for even a highly intelligent person?
Would you risk losing your mind for its sake?
I can hear the name of Jung making a sound like
The rustling of autumn leaves.
After all he’s dead.
The collective subconscious can’t explain what enlightenment is since it’s not the same as the IQ’s elite.
And so on.
It’s a loop.
Enlightenment and the IQ. What are they in reality?
To my understanding, “Enlightenment” is the quest to comprehend things that don’t necessarily have anything to do with intelligence. For instance, you can become “enlightened” to the plight of others, but that isn’t going to show up on an IQ test. Perhaps an “Emotional Intelligence” test, but not one that’s going to get you into some special academic program.
“IQ” is pretty much just a number to measure a number of cognitive processes. IQ strongly correlates to your upbringing, environment and education, and thus, can be “trained” to be higher. Average IQ has gone up in certain countries over time, and gone down in others. But it’s not likely to become improved as the result of the typical understanding of “enlightenment”. Not directly, anyway.
I am having a bit of trouble here equating the training you say you have had and the classes you say you have taught with the very basic questions you are asking which you should have had answered many times over with your experience. “What is enlightenment?” is something you ask on a message after all the experience you have had?
Shouldn’t you maybe be asking the Swami instead?
You sound tight with the guy, having travelled with him!
What do you mean when you claim to have a low I.Q.-how low?
edited to add: You claim to have studied law and at a film school, in addition to the training described in your OP. All of this just doesn’t match up with your “low I.Q.” claim.
This is largely content free. But if it goes off the rails, I’m sending it to the Pit. Be warned.
mrka-In all your yoga and/or metaphysical training were you ever told the definitions of “enlightenment” and/or “I.Q.” and, if so, why did you reject those definitions?
edited to add: When you taught yoga, what did you tell your students when they asked these questions?
<keanu reeves>Whoa!</keanu reeves>
Stranger
Everything I know about the universe I learned from watching Point Break.
I have a high IQ. I wouldn’t say I’m enlightened. I was taught, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’
Intelligence is negatively correlated with being religious, but I have no idea about enlightenment.
I’ve really only surfed point breaks for most of my surfing life…they just make you paddle further. I used to think surfing was the only path, (to what? who knows, but sure is great fun) now I’m not so sure…the older I get, the more confounding everything seems.:smack:
I don’t know what enlightenment is exactly, because I’ve never bothered to look into it. I suspect that to the degree it’s not a myth it’s a calm mental state along the line of meditation or self-hypnosis or somesuch, but I don’t actually know, because I don’t care.
It’s not a conundrum for me, because I’m not confused by it. Just disinterested.
But whatever it is, I would never choose my mind to gain it. Ever. That’s a price I would never ever choose to pay.
They say that ignorance is bliss - based on that I reject bliss. They say that simple folk are happy - based on that I reject happiness. I druther have the contentment I have than a mindless bliss that would cost me dear.
On the contrary, in my estimation being a nitwit is an excellent aid towards believing in spendiferous fettuccine.
I like how you said, enlightened to the plight of others. But it takes a highly intelligent and motivated person to understand what plight means. As to understanding the other, it takes to be enlightened.
So what is oneness. Uniqueness? Collectively? Being gregarious?
The pebble. Still in my hand. Just sayin.
I believe that IQ tests usually measure something, but if you were raised isolated you probably didn’t have the referents they assume, so I wouldn’t put much stock in your IQ results.
I have a reasonably high IQ and am proudly unenlightened, being both a skeptic and a materialist.
As for
The higher the IQ, the higher you can raise the kundalini.
I have no idea of what that is. But I can raise tomatoes okay.
I think that, to answer all of your posts in one reply, summing up enlightenment is a matter of burning curiosity and wild guesswork or it is a bland matter of faith no worse than the belief in g-d is.
The higher the intelligence, the better the chances to grasp the basic issue of what curiosity is and to plumb the more complex nature of both intelligence and enlightenment.
Finding answers requires method and patience.
As in science, observe and arrive at a theory then arrive at a law.
Which could be one way of understanding the movie ARRIVAL.
Enlightenment is closest to a person’s mind whose life is one of drudgery or isn’t it?
Does it thrive on being aloof contrasting with poverty and misery?
The Buddha left his palace to go meditate under a special 
tree. The Bodhi tree.
Christ said the kingdom of heaven is for the poor.
The poor never meditate and attain enlightenment. Or do they?
What is a worker’s lifestyle if he seeks relief from feeling downtrodden by doing drugs?
Is it just an escape?
Hobos used to have a big rock candy mountain that appeared to them as a paradise on earth.
Enlightenment’s price is leaving the world behind even if it’s an illusion.
So much has been thrown at us by the clergy about g-d that feels like a wet towel.
People are getting enlightenment in their pragmatic lives by using their brains.
G-d and Buddha who is disembodied by reason of attainment will soon have to show their true colors.
There’s still the bourgeois concept of intelligence.
IQs.
Which you’ll need to thrash out.
I’m not a Marxist but I feel trapped by my IQ and by my attempts at becoming enlightened when I was young.
It all needs a context to be truthful, secure, practical and trustworthy.
No. There is a lot of silliness in your post, but I think I can handle this one small bit without losing it: No “big rock candy mountain” appeared to hobos. It was only a song that described what a heaven for hoboes might be like.
I took a couple of semesters of Buddhism in college. This is my understanding. Buddhists characterize enlightenment a little differently than the Hindu tradition. Bear that in mind.
The Buddha maintained that enlightenment requires a certain minimum level of intelligence. (I would interpret that to mean that those of lower intelligence have to work harder at it.) But a high IQ won’t get you enlightenment on its own. To be enlightened, you need some sort of training; either that or you have to (re)invent the path without assistance, which doesn’t happen often. The Buddha did it though.
Over at wiki, the page on Hinduism has a section on moksha, which is the Hindi conception of enlightenment. It seems different than the Buddhist version. I don’t have the background to understand it, by which I mean I haven’t even read an article on the subject. Hinduism - Wikipedia
There’s actually a question here. Enlightenment has a definition in Hinduism and Buddhism. It has conceptual aspects, though it is also a practice. It’s sort of like being able to apply the quadratic formula: to do so you need knowledge but also time spent with pencil and paper.